‘Bagworm’ Is a Mind-Bending, Body Horror Odyssey [SXSX Review]

Crash-out cinema is back. Last year’s Oscar hopefuls—among them Marty Supreme and If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You—mined considerable zest by running their leads through the absolute wringer. Their raison d’être seemed, at times, to be seeing just how much their respective protagonists were willing to endure before breaking. They also, not incidentally, featured largely likeable, or at least tolerable, leads. Not so in Oliver Bernsen’s Bagworm. Carroll (Peter Falls) is an absolute cad, but that never stops his hallucinatory spiral from being a wickedly fun delight.

Carroll’s bleeding-heart liberalism is a mask for paranoia. He’s convinced the world is ending, and no one cares as much as he does. He’s special that way, spending evenings enraptured by YouTube rabbit holes about rural Indian labor abuses, spinning those cataclysmic yarns for anyone kind enough to listen. Patience wears thin, especially when intersected with Carroll’s basest need—sex.

First dates end disastrously, either because a date is a little too curious about his (conspicuously) photoshopped profile pictures or, God forbid, ordered the fish. His breakdown regarding the latter is uncomfortable yet stirring, an early augur for the kind of value-based chaos Carroll incites everywhere he goes.

He’s a horny guy who can’t catch a break, and the only obstacle in the way is him, though any hope for redemption is lost when, cigarette in mouth on a vinyl chair (full Hillbilly Elegy mode), he stands and steps on a rusty nail. There was the thinnest veneer of stability beforehand (Bagworm opens with a pulsating, slimy… something), less so as Carroll’s wound bubbles and infects his entire body. Is it tetanus, or does Carroll really know something we don’t?